It’s the end of the world as we know it

So much of our society seems to be obsessed by the end of the world: Armageddon, the end of times, the grand finale. There are so many websites and blogs dedicated to this subject and most of them sadly are religious.

I am fed up with hearing about all the reasons and ways the world will end. Often, the people who promote this kind of insanity actually pick dates for our last days. Thankfully, these dates come and go without incident.

These prophecies have been made for centuries. Some people believe them and do all kinds of crazy things in fear of or in the hope they’ll survive the apocalypse. But the earth continues spinning through space, the sun rises and sets, the moon visits us every night and the stars move by overhead as they always have.

The problem is that today we have the power to actually cause the end of the world. Many countries have nuclear missiles that if deployed could wipe out our beautiful and fragile planet many times over. There have been accidents and close calls over the past decades that could have meant our extinction on Earth.

Rather than evolving into a species that lives in peace we are still acting like a bunch of cavemen aggressively fighting over territory and the other tribe’s resources. But we’re not doing it with clubs, arrows or guns, but with very powerful missiles and bombs. Countries are playing chicken with each other in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. We Canadians are part of this insanity, which features the big players like the United States, Russia and China.

Rather than finding peaceful ways to solve conflicts and share the resources we have on this planet, we are attacking, killing and pillaging countries in much the same way we were hundreds of years ago. What the heck is wrong with us? Are we all that lost that we think this is a good way to manage our planet?

What is behind all of this aggression? It seems to me that the most powerful and greedy of our countries are promoting war to make money, feeding a huge industry dedicated to the sales of arms worldwide. Trillions of dollars are made in the sale of ships, submarines, aircraft, guns and bombs.

The really rich people starting these wars never go to fight in them. Their children and grandchildren never go to war.

However, they reap the benefits of capturing resources and making profits on supplying the war machine. So, if that is the case why don’t we all stand up to this terrible reality and demand that this insanity of war stop? It probably has to do with the fact that the same people who start these wars also control most of the media and rarely question what the rich and powerful do. Our school systems do not question war and how unfairly wealth is shared in our world. We graduate thousands of university and college students who are mainly concerned with making lots of money, buying lots of stuff and living a “me” lifestyle.

Most of us don’t even know how politics and power are organized. So, in all fairness to the average person, the chips are stacked against us. We are programmed very much these days not to be aware of why and how things are happening in our world.

The problem is that if we don’t break out of this fog and become more aware, then those insane end-of-the-world promoters may at some point be right. The end of the world will not occur because of some divine reason. It will be because of greed and our refusal to wake up. We can change the way things are heading. We just have to work together and believe we can do it.